The Jewish Future We Are Stealing

The young are not abandoning a living world. They are watching adults turn sacred fragments into excuses for avoiding shared responsibility.

There is sadness in the growing distance between many young Jews and Israel. But it would be too easy, and too convenient, to blame the young.

Something deeper is happening. Christianity, progressive universalism, and anti-Zionism may become attractive to some Jews, but they are symptoms, not the cause. They become attractive when Jewish life no longer appears as a living communal form, but as memory without place, law without shared burden, and identity without a world.

For many young Jews in the diaspora, Jewish memory is no longer rooted in the original density of diaspora life. It is not carried by language, neighborhood, ritual, danger, mutual dependence, family discipline, local history, and embodied continuity. It is often mediated through schools, museums, ceremonies, inherited trauma, moral instruction, and institutional slogans. It tells them to remember, but it does not always show them where that memory is supposed to live.

A memory without place becomes strangely mobile. It can attach itself to any figure of suffering. It can be transferred from Jewish history to a general ethics of victimhood. It can even be turned against Jewish sovereignty itself. In that moment, Jewish memory no longer protects Jewish continuity. It becomes a floating moral energy, available for other causes, other liturgies, other forms of belonging.

This is not the fault of the young.

Young people do not abandon living worlds easily. They abandon structures that demand loyalty before offering participation. They abandon institutions that speak of continuity but do not give them a future they can respect.

We keep speaking about Jewish values because we are afraid to ask whether we still transmit a Jewish world.

Values are portable. A world is not.

Values can be placed on a poster, in a sermon, in a donor brochure, in a school curriculum, or in a public statement after every crisis. A world must be inhabited, paid for, defended, corrected, and shared. A world has a table, a street, a language, a law, a wound, and a burden.

This is where part of rabbinic Judaism has failed in its fixation. Not rabbinic Judaism as such, but its defensive form: the form that preserves boundaries more efficiently than it generates communal life. When Torah, halacha, authority, and education cease to produce a world in which people can dwell, they begin to function as instruments of maintenance. They preserve continuity, but they do not necessarily create presence.

When Jewish presence disappears, other forms become powerful. Christianity offers drama: incarnation, sin, forgiveness, liturgy, suffering, redemption. Progressive politics offers its own secular liturgy: guilt, confession, purification, victims, oppressors, public rituals of denunciation. Anti-Zionism offers something even more dangerous: the possibility of remaining ethically Jewish while cutting oneself off from the burden of Jewish power.

But the tragedy is not only in the diaspora. It is also in Israel.

Israel was supposed to be the place where Jewish memory became history again, where the Jewish people did not merely remember exile but assumed the risk of political existence. That meant army, law, borders, compromise, taxation, courts, grief, restraint, and the burden of governing without innocence.

Sovereignty is never pure. It cannot be. But it can still be serious.

Today, parts of Israeli political and religious life appear to be moving in the opposite direction. Instead of transforming Jewish memory into shared responsibility, they are turning fragments of Jewish existence into idols.

The settlement is treated by some as if it were the whole of Zionism. Torah study is treated by some as if it could stand in for national service. Coalition survival is treated as if it were Jewish continuity. Security is treated as if it abolished moral and institutional limits. Majority power is treated as if it could replace constitutional restraint. Each fragment claims the authority of the whole.

That is idolatry.

Idolatry does not always mean bowing before a foreign god. It can also mean taking one necessary fragment of Jewish life and allowing it to claim total authority. Land without justice becomes an idol. Torah without shared burden becomes an idol. Security without law becomes an idol. Majority power without restraint becomes an idol. Even memory itself can become an idol when it no longer opens a future but only demands submission.

This is why the attempt to elevate Torah study into a constitutional principle, especially in the context of the Haredi draft crisis, is so damaging. Torah study is central to Jewish civilization. No serious Jew should mock it. But precisely because Torah is central, it must not be used as a political shield against the common burden of Israeli life.

When Torah becomes a legal instrument for exemption, it is not strengthened. It is diminished.

A state cannot be held together by one group’s blood and another group’s sacred exception.

The asymmetry is not theoretical. One young Jew carries a rifle, loses a year of life, returns with trauma, buries friends, pays taxes, and is told to remain patient for the sake of unity. Another is protected by a sacred exemption and told that his study sustains the nation in a higher way.

A society may tolerate many tensions. It cannot indefinitely survive this one without poisoning its own future.

This is also why some recent religious language about sinat chinam and unconditional love is so troubling.

At first, it sounds noble. We are told that hatred can disguise itself as holy struggle, even as zeal for Torah. That is true. Jewish history knows very well how sacred language can become a weapon. But then the honest next step is avoided. Who, today, is using Torah not as a discipline of responsibility, but as an instrument of separation, privilege, and refusal of the common burden?

Too often, the answer is dissolved into a universal mist: each of us, all of us, the human heart, the broken soul. This sounds humble. In practice, it can become a way of protecting the very structures that need to be judged.

When unconditional love is placed where responsibility is required, ahavat Yisrael is turned into a shield for asymmetry.

A young secular Israeli, a Mizrahi soldier, a reservist, a taxpayer, a bereaved family, or a family waiting for a hostage cannot simply be told to love those who organize their own exemption as holiness. That is not national healing. That is the sacralization of inequality.

The maneuver is subtle but devastating. A political and institutional crisis is moved into the interior of the soul. Once the conflict becomes primarily a problem of hatred, anger, or insufficient love, the concrete questions disappear: budgets, military service, rabbinic power, education, civic burden, courts, coalition extortion, and responsibility toward young Jews who are being asked to inherit the consequences.

This kind of language speaks against hatred while protecting a structure that produces resentment.

It is not a cure. It is a perfumed smoke screen.

The danger of Korach was never simply rebellion. It was rebellion speaking in the language of holiness. That is why the story remains so dangerous. Holiness can be used not to assume responsibility, but to evade it. A community can say “we are all holy” while refusing the burdens that make holiness truthful.

In our own moment, this is not an ancient problem. It is a political technique.

The real question is not only what the government does, or what the rabbis say, or what the Haredi parties demand, or what young Jews believe. The real question is what we have trained ourselves not to feel.

We have become skilled at explanation. We explain coalitions, exemptions, security needs, religious sensitivities, demographic pressures, judicial conflicts, diaspora alienation, historical trauma, and political necessity. But explanation can become a narcotic. A people can explain itself into moral sleep.

The most frightening sign is not wrongdoing itself. Human beings fail. Governments fail. Religious communities fail. The frightening sign is the disappearance of shame.

When shame disappears, Torah can still be studied, quoted, kissed, legislated, and celebrated, but it no longer wounds the conscience. It becomes an ornament of the very self it was meant to judge.

If the Torah is the book of God and not the possession of man, then it cannot be turned into a decoration for our innocence. It cannot be used to protect the fragment from the judgment of the whole. It cannot be invoked to exempt us from the responsibilities that make Jewish existence serious.

There should be shame in this.

Not sentimental sadness, not another conference about Jewish continuity, not another sermon about young Jews losing their way. Shame.

There should be shame when a society asks its young to carry Jewish memory while depriving them of a credible Jewish future. There should be shame when Torah is invoked not to deepen responsibility, but to protect exemption. There should be shame when the language of security is used to dissolve law, when land is treated as if it absolved injustice, and when political survival is confused with the survival of the Jewish people.

The young are not the virus.

The virus is the slow corruption of the common future.

It enters quietly. First as factional necessity. Then as sacred exception. Then as contempt for institutions. Then as indifference toward those who will inherit the damage. It teaches each group to protect its fragment and call that fragment Judaism, Zionism, Torah, security, democracy, or survival. It weakens the shared body while pretending to defend it.

This is how a people can wound its own continuity while speaking constantly about continuity.

Nor is the diaspora innocent.

It often wants Jewish ethics without Jewish risk, Jewish suffering without Jewish sovereignty, Jewish memory without the unbearable question of what a people must do when innocence is no longer available.

The sadness, then, is not that young Jews are confused. Confusion is often an honest response to a damaged field. The sadness is that Israel, which should have offered them a difficult but serious form of Jewish reality, increasingly appears to them as a theatre of factional absolutism.

They look toward Israel and do not see a common world.

They see competing idols.

That perception may be unfair in many individual cases. Israel is still full of courage, grief, intelligence, sacrifice, love, and moral seriousness. One must never reduce a living society to the failures of its government or the arrogance of its factions. But political damage accumulates. Institutional damage accumulates. Theological damage accumulates.

The young inherit not speeches, but structures. They do not inherit what leaders claim to defend. They inherit what those leaders actually make possible.

And no amount of Torah reading will repair that by itself.

Torah study cannot substitute for justice, common service, institutional responsibility, or the hard civic discipline without which Jewish sovereignty becomes another sacred fragment devouring the whole.

A Jewish future cannot be built by depriving young Jews of a future they can respect.

If Israel loses that, the diaspora will not be saved by sermons. If the diaspora loses that, Israel will not be saved by slogans. The task is not to accuse the young of drifting away. The task is to ask why the house they are asked to enter so often looks less like a home than a battlefield of sacred fragments.

A fragment can preserve something precious.

But when the fragment declares itself whole, it begins to destroy the very world it claims to save.

And if we can watch this happen, explain it, justify it, spiritualize it, and still feel no shame, then the crisis is already deeper than politics.

It has entered the Jewish conscience itself.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig